Donald Trump’s successful infiltrations into the worlds of both real estate and politics have been constructed on a foundation of cons. One of the more important of these, in both 2016 and 2024, was the strange notion that he was some sort of “antiwar” candidate. You remember: Hillary Clinton was the hawk, the mad bomber; Trump was a man of peace.
This was always propaganda. Yes, with respect to Iraq, it was kind of true. Clinton voted for the war as a senator. (This is the irony of her political career: Back during the lead-up to the Iraq War, the accepted Beltway wisdom was that “yea” was the safe political vote for a Democrat eyeing the presidency to make. And yet, her vote arguably cost her the nomination in 2008 and played some role in costing her the presidency in 2016, when the right really drove home the “Hillary as hawk” narrative.)
But Trump wasn’t nearly the Iraq War critic that he wanted people to believe—he expressed support for the war in the run-up and in its early days, and he only turned against it when it starting going south. Even then, his main criticism was that U.S. forces didn’t max out the possible conquest by taking Iraq’s oil—a fact that’s well worth remembering in this particular news cycle.
Speaking of, here we are, a decade after his first campaign, with Trump having just started his own little unilateral regime-change war. You can choose to call what’s happening in Venezuela a “legal action” or whatever you like, but if someone killed more than 100 American civilians at sea, making accusations about what they were up to without offering proof, and then sent more than 150 aircraft into our airspace and killed 40 of our civilians while arresting and forcefully extraditing our president, I reckon we’d be calling it “war.”
So what’s going on here? Why is the antiwar president making war?
The answer is that Trump is not antiwar. He never has been. That was always a fiction peddled by Trump, his lackeys, and the right-wing media to contrast him with Clinton and Joe Biden to fool the Gullible American community. He is anti-West. Here’s the difference, and why it can look confusing to people who don’t know any better.
When “the West,” led usually by the United States, starts a war, it does so in support of certain stated principles. Now let me quickly point out: Those principles might be wrongly and even tragically applied, and they might be ill conceived. The United States fought the war in Vietnam, for example, in defense of “freedom” (and against communism) and out of the conviction, the “domino theory,” that failing to stop the Reds in Saigon would all but ensure that they’d soon take over across all of South Asia and, before you knew it, would be on our doorstep. (Lyndon Johnson also feared that Congress would impeach him if he didn’t do it.)
This was all crazy talk grounded in a Cold War paranoia whose roots ran nearly as deep in the elite American psyche of the 1950s and 1960s as the belief that we were the world’s defenders of freedom. (See, for example, the tragic figure of James Forrestal, America’s first secretary of defense and a man whose paranoia drove him eventually to suicide.) But my point is, at least there was an attempt to root these decisions in principles; at least there was a foundation for critique and accountability. We didn’t invade Vietnam because we wanted the Lebensraum, or to seize its bauxite. We invaded based on a theory—again, a tragically wrong one—that we were defending “Western” values.
George W. Bush would no doubt say, and did say at the time on many occasions, the same thing about Iraq. I never thought, as many left-wing critics did, that that war was about oil, although the prospect of some easy oil revenues didn’t hurt, from the neocons’ perspective. And I never thought, as Michael Moore argued in Fahrenheit 9/11, that it was about the Carlyle Group. Rather, it was about establishing the United States as the preeminent global power in a unipolar, post–Cold War world; and, in Bush’s mind, I’m sure, it was also about bringing freedom to the people of Iraq—that is, he convinced himself that he was upholding Western values.
What Trump is against is the idea that America’s military might needs to be tethered to some positive-sum goal that positions the United States as a force that fosters global security and Western democracy. It’s this entire notion of values that Trump is against, not war per se. As my colleague Greg Sargent wrote last summer during an intra-MAGA squabble over how far the Trump administration should go in backing Israel in its aggressive acts toward Iran: “Some confuse Trump’s hostility to the postwar liberal international order with an ‘isolationism’ that eschews foreign military entanglements. But as Nicholas Grossman points out, this doesn’t reflect principled opposition to military action. It reflects Trump’s desire to shred the Western alliance and suck up to authoritarians who similarly hate that alliance, while generally undermining multilateralism and any other international frameworks he might perceive as constraining to the U.S.—and to himself.”
In other words, it’s not war Trump opposes. It’s just war in defense of the Western alliance. War is fine, provided it’s just about what everything is, to him, really all about: raw power in the service of plunder and conquest.
One might argue that this is, in its way, refreshing. After all, if all that hifalutin rhetoric about Western values is so malleable that it can be twisted into justifying catastrophic misadventures like Vietnam and Iraq, maybe it’s better to have someone who rejects such categories utterly.
Well—no. It’s not refreshing. It’s terrifying, for two reasons.
First: The fact that the United States has badly misapplied its values and even lied about them in prosecuting wars does not provide a basis for jettisoning those values. Rather, it provides a basis for defending those values honestly and honorably. We have done this too, from time to time. We, led by that other Clinton, worked with our European partners to stop (eventually) Slobodan Milošević in the Balkans. Under Barack Obama and, yes, Donald Trump, we snuffed out ISIS (but they’ve been staging a comeback lately, and this too is a flashpoint worth watching this year). Joe Biden led what was for a time an inspiring coalition trying to help Ukraine repel Russia. War is never not messy and without unintended consequences, but those are three cases where, for the most part, we did good.
Second: A world in which values don’t exist is a jungle. I’d love to live in a world where values were consistently applied to actions. But we’ll never live in that world. So given the realistic choices, I’d rather live in a world where principles are erroneously and inconsistently applied—and occasionally well applied!—than a world where they don’t even exist. Trump wants the latter world. And, with his pals Putin and Xi, he is quickly making it.
You have only to look at the National Security Strategy published last December. It signals to strongmen and kleptocrats around the world that the United States won’t interfere in their regional affairs—affairs that typically involve the widespread oppression of innocent people. The breakup language therein with respect to Europe couldn’t be clearer. It’s time, says the NSS, to have an “America First” policy, which means whatever Trump decides it means. This year, we’ve learned that “America First” means pardoning a Trump ally who trafficked 500 tons of drugs into the U.S. while sending the U.S. military to kidnap a head of state on the same (though shakier) grounds.
There is little evidence at hand that Trump’s war is going to make sense. It’s not quite about democracy (early signs point to leaving the corrupt Chavismo regime in charge as long as it pays tribute to Trump) or drugs (see above) or the fact that Maduro and his wife carried machine guns (the basis of two of the four counts against them; it’s a weird charge coming from a man who shrugs every time American children are gunned down with the same weapons). It’s about oil, to some extent.
But as the administration’s renewed threats against Greenland and Mexico demonstrate, Trump’s war is mainly about establishing U.S. ownership over our own “near abroad,” to use the phrase Putin invokes to refer to Ukraine and other nearby nations. And it’s a nudge and a wink to Putin and Xi: Don’t mess with me in my near abroad, and I won’t mess with you in yours. That has potentially terrifying consequences for Ukraine, Taiwan, and other nations; and for a larger world order in which national sovereignty is respected.
So, no, Donald Trump was never antiwar—if anything, he is dangerously enamored of his office’s death-dealing capabilities. The question we now face is, exactly how pro-war, on his own despotic terms, is he? In Mexico and Canada and Greenland—and Ukraine and Taiwan and across Latin America—they’re watching closely. Or at least they should be.
